Emil Alexov elected a 2025 AIMBE Fellow

Emil Alexov, a professor in the Clemson University Department of Physics and Astronomy, has been elected a 2025 Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE).

Alexov, who helped establish a new graduate program at Clemson in medical biophysics, is a leading scientist in the field of computational biophysics. 

By combining physics principles and cutting-edge computer algorithms, he has established novel research fields and made significant contributions to biophysics and personalized medicine, including revealing crucial molecular mechanisms of genetic disorders and developing algorithms for predicting energy changes caused by mutations and their association with pathogenicity in humans.

“Most human diseases have a genetic component, either making us more predisposed to get sick or because a particular DNA variation we have will make us sick, no matter what we do,” Alexov said. “So, some diseases are avoidable. Some of them are not simply because we have some wrong thing in our DNA. Our goal is to understand how these genetical differences cause diseases.” 

Election to the AIMBE College of Fellows is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to medical and biological engineers, comprising the top 2% of engineers in those fields. Membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to “engineering and medicine research, practice or education” and to “the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of medical and biological engineering or developing/implementing innovative approaches to bioengineering education.”

Exceptional advancements

Alexov was elected by peers and members of the College of Fellows for “exceptional advancements in computational biophysics, software development and disease mechanisms, and establishing the (Clemson) medical biophysics graduate program.”

He is the fifth faculty member from Clemson to be named an AIMBE Fellow.

Alexov earned his master’s in plasma physics in 1983 and his Ph.D. in radiophysics in 1991 from Sofia University in Bulgaria. In 1992, he joined the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences as a staff scientist. In 1994-95, he conducted research at RIKEN, a national scientific research institute in Japan, before assuming a postdoctoral position in City College of New York. He later joined Columbia University and Howard Hughes Medical Institute as a senior scientist.

Alexov joined the Clemson faculty in 2005.He was selected as a Clemson University School of Health Research (CUSHR) Faculty Fellow in 2019. Faculty Fellows are tenured faculty members who are embedded in a Prisma Health-Upstate department for a semester and summer to produce health-related research. In 2021, he received the Dr. Wallace R. Roy Distinguished Professorship